A Christmas Revolution To Remember

Pastor Lazio Tokes

In the words of Bojidar Marinov:

Exactly 20 years ago, on December 15, 1989, a small crowd of parishioners of the Hungarian Reformed Church in Timisoara gathered in front of the church flat where their pastor lived. The occasion was the eviction orders to their pastor set for that day by a Romanian civil court. The group formed a human chain around the flat. When the police arrived to remove the pastor from the flat, the crowd had grown to several hundred strong; they were singing hymns in the brutally cold weather and from their words the police guards understood that the people were determined to stay and prevent the eviction of their pastor. The police guards returned with agents of the dreaded Communist secret police Securitate, but to no avail, the crowd refused to let them pass. For the first time in the history of Communist Romania someone was refusing to obey Securitate.

On the next day the mayor of Timisoara—the second largest city in Romania—arrived and tried to persuade the crowd to disperse. He arrived with the pastor’s family doctor to persuade the pregnant wife of the pastor to come with them to the hospital. She refused. By that time the crowd had grown beyond the numbers of the congregation, with young ethnic Romanians joining the Hungarian Reformed believers in the vigil and the human chain in the cold December day. The mayor then left, threatening to return with police watercannons.

On December 17, instead of police watercannons, Army troops took positions against the now significant demonstrations that had grown from the humble crowd of Reformed parishioners. They fired into the crowd. This did not stop the demonstrators. On December 18 tens of thousands of industrial workers in Timisoara left their jobs to join the demonstrations. By December 20 the city was out of the control of the Communist government. The insurrection spread to other cities in Romania, and on December 22 the most brutal and maniacal Communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe—that of Nicolae Ceausescu—fell.

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